The Anthropocene Reviewed, Animated

my novel turtles all the way down was published in october of 2017 and after spending that month on tour for the book i came home to indianapolis and blazed a trail between my children's tree house and the little room where my wife and i often work a room that depending on your world view is either an office or a shed this was not like a metaphorical trail it was an actual trail in the woods and to make it i cleared dozens of the prolific and invasive honeysuckle trees that choke much of central indiana and i dug up the english ivy that had taken over and then i covered the path in wood chips and lined it with bricks i worked on the path 10 or 12 hours a day five or six days a week for a month and when i finally finished i timed myself walking along the path from our office to the tree house 58 seconds it took me a month to build a 58 second walk in the woods a week after finishing this path i was searching through a drawer for some chapstick when all at once and without any warning my balance failed the world began to roll and spin i was suddenly a very small boat in very high seas my eyes shivered in their sockets and i began vomiting and was rushed to the hospital for weeks afterwards the world spun and spun eventually i was diagnosed with labyrinthitis a disease of the inner ear with a wonderfully resonant name that is nonetheless an unambiguously one-star experience recovery from labyrinthitis meant weeks in bed unable to read or watch tv or play with my kids i had only my thoughts at times drifting through a drowsy sky at other times panicking me with their insistence and omnipresence during these long still days my mind traveled all over roaming through the past the writer allegra goodman was once asked whom would you like to write your life story and she answered i seem to be writing it myself but since i'm a novelist it's all in code and for me it had started to feel like some people thought they knew the code they would assume i shared the world view of a book's protagonist or they'd ask me questions as if i were the protagonist one famous interviewer asked me if i also like the narrator of turtles all the way down experienced panic attacks when kissing i had invited such questions i suppose by having a public life as a mentally ill person but still talking so much about myself in the context of fiction became exhausting for me and a little destabilizing i told the interviewer that no i do not have anxiety around kissing but i do experience panic attacks and they are intensely frightening and as i talked i felt distant from myself like myself wasn't really mine but instead something i was selling or at the very least renting out in exchange for good press as i recovered from labyrinthitis i realized i didn't want to write in code anymore in 2000 i worked for a few months as a student chaplain in a children's hospital i was enrolled in divinity school at the time and planning to become an episcopal minister but my time at the hospital disavowed me of those plans i couldn't handle the devastation i saw there i still can't handle it instead of going to divinity school i moved to chicago and found work as a typist for temp agencies before eventually landing a job doing data entry for book list magazine a bi-weekly book review journal a few months later i got my first chance to review a book after an editor asked me if i liked romance novels i told her i loved them and she gave me a novel set in 17th century london over the next five years i reviewed hundreds of books for book list from picture books about the buddha to poetry collections and in the process i became fascinated by the format of the review booklist reviews were limited to 175 words which meant every sentence had to work multiple jobs each review had to introduce a book while also analyzing it your compliments needed to live right alongside your concerns at book list reviews do not include ratings on a 5 star scale why would they in 175 words one can communicate far more to potential readers than any single data point ever could the five-star scale has only been used in critical analysis for the past few decades while it was occasionally applied to film criticism as early as the 1950s the five-star scale wasn't used to rate hotels until 1979 and it wasn't widely used to rate books until amazon introduced user reviews the five-star scale doesn't really exist for humans it exists for data aggregation systems which is why it did not become standard until the internet era making conclusions about a book's quality from a 175 word review is hard work for artificial intelligences whereas star ratings are ideal for them it's tempting to make labyrinthitis a metaphor my life lacked balance and so i was devastated by a balance disorder i spent a month drawing a straight line of a trail only to be told that life is never simple paths only dizzying labyrinths that fold in on themselves even now i find myself structuring this introduction like a maze coming back to places i thought i'd left but this symbolization of disease is exactly what i tried to write against in my novels turtles all the way down and the fault in our stars where i hope at least ocd and cancer are portrayed not as battles to be won or symbolic manifestations of character flaws or whatever but as illnesses to be lived with as well as one can i did not get labyrinthitis because the universe wanted to teach me a lesson about balance so i tried to live with it as well as i could within six weeks i was mostly better but i still experience bouts of vertigo and they are terrifying i know now with a viscerality i didn't before that consciousness is temporary and precarious it's not a metaphor to say that human life is a balancing act as i got better i wondered what i would do with the rest of my life i went back to making a video every tuesday and a weekly podcast with my brother but i wasn't writing that fall and early winter was the longest i'd gone without trying to write for an audience since i was 14 years old i suppose i missed writing but in the way you miss someone you used to love i left book list and chicago in 2005 because my wife sarah got into graduate school in new york when she finished her degree we moved to indianapolis where sarah worked for the indianapolis museum of art as a curator of contemporary art and we have lived here ever since i read so much at book list that i can't remember when i first came across the word anthropocene but it must have been around 2002 the anthropocene is a proposed term for the current geologic age in which humans have profoundly reshaped the planet's biodiversity and its geology nothing is more human than aggrandizing humans but we are a hugely powerful force on earth in the 21st century my brother hank who started out his professional life as a biochemist once explained it to me like this as a person he told me your biggest problem is other people you are vulnerable to people and reliant upon them but imagine instead that you are a 21st century river or desert or polar bear your biggest problem is still humans you are still vulnerable to them and reliant upon them hank had been with me on that book tour in the fall of 2017 and to pass the time on long drives between cities we'd try to one-up each other with absurd google user reviews for the places we drove past a user named lucas for example gave badlands national park one star not enough mountain he reported in the years since i'd been a book reviewer everyone had become a reviewer and everything had become a subject for reviews the five-star scale was applied not just to books and films but to public restrooms and wedding photographers the medication i take to treat my obsessive-compulsive disorder has more than 100 ratings at drugs.com with an average score of 3.8 a scene in the movie adaptation of my book the fault in our stars was filmed on a bench in amsterdam and that bench now has hundreds of google reviews my favorite three-star review reads in its entirety it is a bench as hank and i marveled at the sudden every awareness of reviewing on a five-star scale i told him that years earlier i'd had an idea to write a review of canada geese hank said the anthropocene reviewed i'd actually written a few of these reviews back in 2014 the one about canada geese and also one about diet dr pepper in early 2018 i sent those reviews to sarah and asked for her thoughts when i reviewed books i was never in the review i imagined myself as a disinterested observer writing from outside my early reviews of diet dr pepper and canada geese were similarly written in the non-fictional version of third-person omniscient narration and after sarah read them she pointed out that in the anthropocene there are no disinterested observers there are only participants she explained that when people write reviews they are really writing a kind of memoir here's what my experience was eating at this restaurant or getting my hair cut at this barber shop i'd written 1500 words about diet dr pepper without once mentioning my abiding and deeply personal love of diet dr pepper around the same time as i began to recover my sense of balance i reread the work of my friend and mentor amy kraus rosenthal who died a few months earlier she had once written for anyone trying to discern what to do with their life pay attention to what you pay attention to that's pretty much all the info you need my attention had become so fractured and my world had become so loud that i wasn't paying attention to what i was paying attention to but when i put myself into the reviews as sarah suggested i felt like for the first time in years i was at least trying to pay attention to what i pay attention to this book started out as a podcast where i tried to chart some of the contradictions of human life as i experience it how we can be so compassionate and so cruel so persistent and so quick to despair above all i wanted to understand the contradiction of human power we are at once far too powerful and not nearly powerful enough we are powerful enough to radically reshape earth's climate and biodiversity but not powerful enough to choose how we reshape them we are so powerful that we have escaped our planet's atmosphere but we are not powerful enough to save those we love from suffering i also wanted to write about some of the places where my small life runs into the large forces of the anthropocene and then in early 2020 after two years of writing the podcast an exceptionally large force appeared in the form of a novel coronavirus i began then to write about the only thing i could write about amid the crisis and writing to you from april of 2021 i am very much still omitted i find much to fear and lament but i also see humans working together to share and distribute what we collectively learn and i see people working together to care for the sick and the vulnerable even separated we are bound up in each other as sarah told me there are no observers only participants at the end of his life the great picture book author and illustrator maury sendak said on the npr show fresh air i cry a lot because i miss people i cry a lot because they die and i can't stop them they leave me and i love them more he said i'm finding out as i'm aging that i'm in love with the world it has taken me all my life up to now to fall in love with the world but i've started to feel it in the last couple years to fall in love with the world is not to ignore or overlook suffering both human and otherwise for me anyway to fall in love with the world is to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the distance of the stars it is to hold your children while they cry to watch as the sycamore trees leaf out in june when my breastbone starts to hurt and my throat tightens and tears well in my eyes i want to turn away from feeling i want to deflect with irony or anything else that will keep me from feeling directly we all know how loving ends but i want to fall in love with the world anyway to let it crack me open i want to feel what there is to feel while i am here sendak ended that interview with the last words he ever said in public live your life live your life live your life and this is my attempt to do so you

Channel: vlogbrothers

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Length: 15min 47sec (947 seconds)

Published: Tue May 25 2021